Hands-On Mamba, Razer’s Cord-Cutting Laser Mouse

Mon, Jan 12, 2009

Let me get this out of the way: this is the finest mouse I have ever held.

It's called the "Mamba," and it is Razer's first wireless gaming mouse. Only, it's not just a wireless mouse. Peep this video to see what I mean:

By pulling a cable out of a charging dock and inserting it into the front of the mouse, the Razer Mamba is a wired mouse as well, sending both power and data through its seven-foot braided mini-USB cable. It's a wonder no one had thought of this before.

Of course, the cable is redundant. I played a quick round of "Call of Duty 4" in wireless mode and paid attention to whether my gun barrel would lag, accelerate or skip as I drew the mouse across the special Razer Goliathus mouse pad. It didn't.

I checked the same on the Windows Desktop. No perceptible lag. While such a device should have a more rigorous test than I could manage on the CES show floor, it felt like I had direct control equal to that of the best wired gaming mice. The only difference I noticed after I plugged in Mamba's cord was that the cable itself was ever-so-slightly restricting my aim.

According to Razer reps, the reason the Mamba can do this is because they've managed to obtain a 1-millisecond response time over 2.4GHz wireless, the same speed that they use in their wired mice, and have an individual MAC address for each mouse. At that speed and a tap-to-spin-180-degrees resolution of 5600 DPI, gamers will be able to frag for 14 hours straight on its 800 mAh lithium-ion polymer battery. There's also 64KB of internal memory for 500-keystroke macros.

With the Mamba, the catch is of course price. One of these sleek wireless mice will run $130.

2.4GHz, Mamba, mice, PC, Peripherals, Razer, Wireless

This post was written by:

Sean Hollister - who has written 825 posts on GameCyte.

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5 Comments For This Post

benzyboy Says:
January 14th, 2009 at 7:28 pm
hi there just curious, i would like to know a few things about this mouse, i hope you can test it and post the results :D. the things i would like to know are:

1. does the mouse have no prediction/correction? i saw a razer video and the razer guy says it has no prediction, so can you confirm this? (for those of you who don't know, no prediction means more precise tracking)

2. can you provide exact measurements of the lift-off distance for this mouse on different types of mousepads, hard, cloth, etc. (low lift-off distance means no accidentaly movements when the mouse is lifted off the mousepad, deathadder has high lift-off which annoys me.)

3. can you test if the mouse tracks flawlessly? by that i mean whether it skips at all, whether it has negative or positive acceleration. also how does the wireless hold up? as a laser mouse, i'm worried it will have tracking problems, but maybe todays laser is as reliable as optical. i certaintly hope so.

this could be the best gaming mouse ever made...fingers crossed
Sean Hollister Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 1:49 am
@benzyboy:

These deserve detailed, prolonged testing, but for now I can tell you that 1.) Several Razer reps told me there was no prediction or correction, and 2.) in my brief testing, the wireless was flawless and there was no noticeable acceleration.

I didn't think to test for lift-off distance on the show floor, but will certainly do so if we get one in for review!
benzyboy Says:
January 15th, 2009 at 2:15 pm
thanks for the quick response.

sounds very promising indeed. i hope razer send you one in for review, because i will be looking foward to reading your review for this mouse. hope the lift-off distance is very low on most surfaces, because the deathadder had many complaints due to its high lift-off distance even after you update the firmware.

this mouse could finally be a worthy laser and wireless gaming mouse.

anyways thanks alot, keep up the good work mate
Lord Alderaan Says:
March 6th, 2009 at 12:45 am
Looks good.

But I'll stick to my 2,5 year old Logitech G7.

2ms, 20g is just as unnoticeable and 2000dpi is more then enough for me. And having fast-swappable batteries (takes me 8s) beats having to switch to wired when the juice runs out.

A lot cheaper too.
http://www.everythingusb.com/logitech_g7_laser_cordless_mouse.html
mrazomor Says:
May 22nd, 2009 at 11:16 am
is this grey color?
i thought it is black?
no mentioning about differnt colors?

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